President Piñera launches the “Everyone to the Classroom” plan: “Quality education opens the door to a world of opportunities.”
The main goal of this plan is to simplify the administrative and regulatory pressure on schools so that leadership teams can spend more time improving educational quality and focus on classrooms. Over 12,000 principals will share ideas in an online forum.
President of Chile Sebastián Piñera presented the initiative “Everyone to the Classroom,” part of the National Education Quality Plan. The initiative seeks to guarantee that leadership teams’ priority is the classroom, thus ensuring quality learning.
“I believe that many education reforms have been undertaken in Chile, but the most important of them all, that goes to the heart of the issue, involves improving education quality. That task still lies before us. Education quality has been stalled in Chile for some time, or has grown a lot less than it should, less than what we need and what we are able to achieve,” the President said.
Over the past decade, government requirements for schools have multiplied, particularly for those that receive state subsidies. These requirements translate into a higher administrative burden that impacts both teachers and leadership teams, with the latter shouldering the majority of the work. Today they spend nearly 40% of their time completing paperwork and administrative processes.
The “Everyone to the Classroom” plan grew out of this situation. Its main goal is to simplify and coordinate administrative and regulatory pressure on schools so that leadership teams can spend their time improving the quality of education.
“Its mission is simple, but very important: to reduce this bureaucratic burden of paperwork, processes and formalities and thus free our principals and teachers up so that they can spend all of that time and especially all of that motivation in the classroom, teaching, motivating, caring for each child and thus achieving important progress in quality,” Piñera said.
The first stage of this plan is to identify, expand on and prioritize the aspects that generate administrative pressure, and then to outline possible paths to be followed in regard to both administrative and system management aspects and the regulatory arena.
The entire teaching community will be involved, drawing on the experience of over 12,000 principals through an online forum.
An interdisciplinary, cross-party working group was formed with the participation of a commission presided over by Mariana Aylwin. Its Executive Secretary is Nicolás Varela of the Education Ministry.
The panel will also include:
-Santiago Blanco, CEO SIP
-Rodrigo Bosch, formerly of CONACEP / Red Educativa
-Mónica Luna, Peñalolén Education Director
-Representative of the Teacher’s Association
-Mario Waissbluth, Educación 2020
-José Weinstein, CEDLE
-Juan Enrique Guarachi, Belén Educa
-Pedro Hepp, Red Educa Araucanía
-María Paz Arzola, Libertad y Desarrollo
-Rubén Valencia, Gesteduc
-Celia Alvariño, Director of Dunalastair School
-Felipe Alessandri, Mayor of Santiago
-Guido Crino, Fide
-Ana María Lyon, Astoreca
The initiative aligns with the four major priorities that the administration has set in education: improving quality at all levels; ensuring access to preschool; improving vocational education quality and better integrating it into the world of work; and improving the quality of training programs.
“We know that education is the mother of all battles. No country has overcome underdevelopment without winning the education battle. And all of the countries that have achieved development have done so because they have managed to win the education battle,” the President said.